BENEATH US *

This exceedingly nasty little horror film takes a genuinely serious topic, (illegal Mexican immigrants looking for work and taking whatever job, no matter how demeaning, well-heeled Americans will dish out), and subverting it so it's the poor immigrants we pity and who are well and truly trounced by the psycho bitch and her husband who hires them. It's a kind of home invasion movie in reverse and it's in the worst possible taste.

The problem is that as it progresses both the situation and the violence becomes more cartoonish and Lynn Collins' performance as the leading nutcase isn't just nutty but positively barking mad. Also it seems unlikely that the strapping hunks they've hired couldn't have overpowered their captors from the beginning. I know there is a (satirical) point to all of this but as a picture of Trump's America it's just too crude to be really effective.

THE STAGGERING GIRL no stars

This enigmatic little memory piece may be only 37 minutes long but it still typifies the worst kind of art-house. A superb cast, (Julianne Moore, Marthe Keller, Kyle MacLachlan, KiKi Layne), mooch about in the past and in the present but none of them manage to engage us on any level other than the banal. The director is Luca Guadagnino and this must rank as nothing more than a doodle on his CV, the kind of film that established film-makers with too much power and money, but perhaps limited imagination, make simply because they can. If, like me, you admire the director's other work it's best you give this one a miss.

CLOCKERS ***

Co-written by its director, Spike Lee, and the author Richard Price from Price's novel, "Clockers" is one of Lee's finest and most underrated films. A whodunit plot provides the backbone to one of Lee's most incisive explorations of the African-American experience in America's inner cities; lives mostly defined by drugs and crime under the eyes of a mostly white police force whose idea of 'doing the right thing' is just not pulling the trigger at the slightest provocation.

It's a stunningly photograped, (Malik Hassan Sayeed was the DP), and brilliantly acted picture, (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro and Keith David are cops while Isaiah Washington, Mekhi Phifer and Delroy Lindo are among the inhabitants of the Projects), that says as much about what it's like to live in America as any movie in the nineties. What distinguishes Lee's work, of course, is the amount of heart he pumps into it. He never reverts to sentimentality but he has a deep affection for all his characters; he even makes his villains complex and human. Largely overlooked at the time of its release, this is one Spike Lee Joint that cries out for reassessment.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL **

Self-consciously grandiose western whose reputation far outweighs its merits. The title alone alludes to its mythic status as does the casting of Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. Of course, we're talking about John Sturges's "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", an even more fictional than usual account of the most famous gunfight in Western history or mythology; you choose. It's a perfectly entertaining picture but it's not much of a Western; you might even say it's a Western for people who don't like Westerns.

All the tropes are in place but when you add them up what you get is a Western in name only minus the necessary feeling. There's nothing here you would find in the films of Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher; nothing even that you might get from a Delmer Daves Western and certainly nothing you would find in the films of John Ford. In the acting stakes Douglas shamelessly steals it from Lancaster and there's a nice supporting turn from Jo Van Fleet but when the best thing in a Western is the Frankie Laine sung title song, you know something's wrong.

EMMA ***

The cast are perfection, the settings sublime and the social observation is as 'Austen' as any Austen I've seen. Yes, this new version of "Emma" is really quite wonderful and I would venture to say even a step up on the 1996 Douglas McGrath version. My only real quibble is that Anya Taylor-Joy, fine as she is, can't quite match Gwyneth Paltrow. Otherwise, what's not to love; a Knightly who isn't too suave or too handsome, (Johnny Flynn, splendid), a Frank Churchill who actually is something of a charmer and nowhere near as obnoxioous as he's often painted, (an excellent Callum Turner), and a gorgeously obsequious Mr. Elton from Josh O'Connor who just about walks off with the film while director Autumn de Wilde, (love that name), keeps it very nicely in period , (none of those little post-modern nods that now seem to be common in pictures of this kind). I also loved her use of English folk song on the soundtrack but this was just the icing on a very sweet cake. This is Jane Austen the way Jane Austen should be done.

THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT **

Can a film top-heavy with jargon, computer-speak and all sorts of things I personally am not familiar with be interesting? I mean, as far the subject matter goes Kim Nguyen's "The Hummingbird Project" might as well have been in a foreign language without subtitles yet this picture about a couple of computer geeks, (Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skaarsgard), striking out on their own to make millions is both a lot
of fun and ultimately very moving even if you can't always make sense of it.

This is largely due to the thoroughly obnoxious and yet totally brilliant Eisenberg in his best geeky mode while the usually ultra-handsome Skaarsgard, now with bald head and glasses to up his geek level, tunrs in a lovely serio-comic performance. Unfortunately Salma Hayek is totally miscast as the high-powered executive they go up against but since almost everyone was talking double-dutch her performance didn't seem that out of place. Of course, despite the comedy-thriller element, (will they succeed? will they get caught?), and the strong human interest story this sure isn't going to pack them in on a Saturday night. However, give yourself over to its oddball charms and you may be very pleasantly surprised.

WESTWARD THE WOMEN ***

"Westward the Women" may not be the greatest western ever made but it's certainly one of the most unusual and is, indeed, very fine and I'm amazed it isn't better known. The women in question are 140 brides being brought West for for the male townsfolk in a Californian valley on a wagon-train lead by Robert Taylor. The director of the picture was William Wellman and William C. Mellor shot it in crisp black-and-white and it has a fine screenplay by Charles Schnee from a story by none other than Frank Capra.

As wagon-train movies go, it's not only unusual but remarkably robust and full of incident and it deals with the male/female dynamic with a surprising degree of honesty and if you don't think so, remember this was 1951. It's certainly not sentimental and Wellman approaches his subject with much the same documentary-like realism that John Ford brought to "Wagonmaster". In a good supporting cast Denise Darcel and Hope Emerson stand out.

MADE IN U.S.A. no stars

Godard at his most infuriating. "Made in U.S.A." is visually superb, (Raoul Coutard is once again the DP), but so enigmatic as to be virtually pointless. It's like an academic treatise on American Film Noir; in other words, how not to do a film noir. If it's meant to be politically relevant it was lost on me. Dropping words like 'Communism' and 'Hanoi' in the middle of a scatalogically surreal screenplay don't imbue them with significance anymore than naming your characters Donald Siegel, Richard Widmark, David Goodis adds up to anything other than a cheap homage. Karina is the star, in colour, and she's gorgeous and you might say that as 'pure cinema', unencumbered by logic or reason, the film actually works but I think you need to be a real Godard aficionado to appreciate it or even to get it. The best thing I can say about it is that it's quite short.

OPERATION FINALE no stars

An intelligent, if lugubrious, account of how Adolf Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires and returned to Israel to stand trial. About the best you can say of Chris Weitz's "Operation Finale" is that it's a decent history lesson but a poor film with a miscast Ben Kingsley as Eichmann, (at the time the film was set Eichmann was 54 while Kingsley is 76 and looks it). As one of the men who did the actual capturing and who, in this film at least, is seen to form a kind of bond with his prisoner, Oscar Isaac isn't at all bad but everyone else in the cast is just some kind of pawn. What's lacking is any sense of urgency. I hate to say it but the film might have been better if it were less tasteful; it's almost as if everyone connected with the film were afraid to get their hands dirty so it's all handled with kid gloves. Material like this deserves better.

THE WHITE CROW **

While it's never likely to go down as one of the great biopics or even as one of the great dance pictures, "The White Crow" is much more enjoyable than I anticipated. The director is Ralph Fiennes who also plays the part of the dance teacher Aleksandr Pushkin and while it's not quite a thriller he does place the emphasis on Nureyev's defection to the West and he's greatly helped by the casting of the dancer Oleg Ivanko as Nureyev who dances brilliantly and proves himself more than credible as an actor.

There's also a good deal of background information of Nureyev's childhood and his early career in Russia while his homosexuality is given its due but fundamentally its main focus is on his eventual escape while authenticity is established by Fiennes' use of Russian almost throughout. It was adapted by David Hare from Julie Kavanagh's biography of the dancer and it does have a fine literary bent to it. Fiennes may not be the most imaginative of directors but he does know a good yarn when he sees one and "The White Crow" is definitely a good yarn.

THE FUGITIVE ***

If you have to make a big screen film version of a long-running television series then "The Fugitive" is the way to go. The original series ran for four years from 1963 to 1967 and is now regarded as something of a television classic. What writers Jeb Stuart and David Twohy and director Andrew Davis have done is to break almost one hundred hours of television down to a very crisp two and they have done it superbly.

By now I'm sure almost everyone knows the story of how Dr. Richard Kimble, accused of the brutal murder of his wife, though innocent, escaped from custody and is pursued by a dogged US Marshall. On TV these roles were played by David Janssen and Barry Morse and are now played by Harrison Ford and a terrific Tommy Lee Jones, who won the Oscar for his performance. The real killer, of course, is the famous, or infamous, one-armed man and Kimble is out to find him.

This is the chase film par excellence and is one of the greatest thrillers of the nineties. Ford and Jones may carry the picture but there isn't a bad performance in sight and Davis handles the virtually non-stop action superbly; it's almost one set-piece after another. An almost obscenely entertaining picture.

THE FROZEN GROUND no stars

"The Frozen Ground" is an Alaska-set serial killer movie that might have been a lot better if director Scott Walker hadn't gone overboard with a roving camera that never sits still together with some very flashy editing. This is kinetic movie-making of the worst kind. It's also not that easy to follow as Walker never keeps his camera in the one place long enough for us to get a handle on what's happening and his use of flashbacks only adds to the confusion.

John Cusack is the serial killer and Nicolas Cage, the cop who is tracking him and it's based on fact. Cage is less mannered than usual and Cusack seems to be building up something of a profile playing murderous scumbags. Since we know who the killer is from the start there is no real suspense and the performances are largely unconvincing. Only the chilly locations prove to be a point of interest.

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS ***

I've seen "Capturing the Friedmans" three times now and I think it's a great piece of documentary film-making but I question my motives for watching it just as I question Andrew Jarecki's motivation in making it. The Friedmans were a fairly typical middle-class Jewish American family; father, mother, three sons, close-knit and living much the way so many families like this do but at the heart of this all-American family lay a dark secret. Father Arnold was a paedophile with a taste for young boys. At first, it seemed that this might just be a case of a man who liked to look at pictures of young boys in sexual situations until the police discovered that Arnold and his youngest son Jesse taught boys computer classes in their home and that during these classes sexual abuse of the boys might be taking place.

What distinguishes "Capturing the Friedmans" from other pieces of 'gutter' investigative journalism are the Friedmans themselves. As Jarecki's film shows they were far from typical. They were not just 'close' but almost pathologically narcissistic. They, and by 'they' I mean the father and the sons, (the mother was mostly left out), loved making home movies, being photographed, putting on shows. In other words, they liked to 'perform'.  There was, therefore, a lot of home-movie footage for Jarecki to draw on while the surviving Friedmans, (the oldest and youngest son, the mother, Arnold's brother) were more than happy to talk to Jarecki and 'perform' for him for the purposes of this film. Arnold was already dead and the middle son refused to be interviewed.

But why did Jarecki make it and why should we want to see it? Is this film 'in the public interest'? It's certainly prurient and the descriptions of what was alleged to have happened are certainly explicit but 'alleged' is the key word here. When Jarecki made his film the case had already been tried but maybe Jarecki felt the outcome wasn't entirely satisfactory. Could the Friedmans have been innocent of the charges brought against them and edited the way it is, "Capturing the Friedmans" becomes something of a real-life thriller; a private nightmare played out, seemingly willingly, in the public gaze. Yes, it's brilliant 'cinema' but deeply depressing. Ultimately it asks more questions than it answers and perhaps it says as much about us as it does about the Friedmans or Jarecki. I can't imagine anyone watching this without feeling a little sick and if we can watch it without being moved, shocked and upset then I think we really need to take a serious look at ourselves. See it and make up your own mind.